Brazil: The South American countries belonging to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation (ACTO) have agreed to initiate an alliance to protect the Amazon at a summit in Brazil. The summit was aimed at stopping the world’s biggest rainforest from reaching “a point of no return.”
The leaders from the eight countries urged developed countries to do more to prevent the destruction of the world’s largest rainforest, calling it a task that cannot fall to just a few countries.
The closely-watched summit of ACTO adopted what host country Brazil called a “new and ambitious shared agenda to save the rainforest.”
The group’s members, including Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela, signed a joint declaration in Belem comprising a nearly 10,000-word roadmap aimed at promoting sustainable development, ending deforestation, and fighting the organised crime that fuels it.
However, the summit participants refrained from agreeing to the key demands of environmentalists and Indigenous groups, including Brazil’s pledge to end illegal deforestation by 2030 and Colombia’s pledge to halt new oil exploration. Instead, countries can pursue their individual deforestation goals.
Brazilian President Mr. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who had been pushing for the region to unite behind a common policy of ending deforestation by 2030, emphasised the “severe worsening of the climate crisis” in his opening speech.
“The challenges of our era and the opportunities arising from them demand we act in unison. It has never been so urgent,” the Brazilian President added.
Colombian President Mr. Gustavo Petro called for a “radical rethink of the global economy and a ‘Marshall Plan’-style strategy in which developing countries’ debt is cancelled in exchange for action to protect the climate.”
“If we are on the verge of extinction and this is the decade when the big decisions have to be made, then what are we doing besides giving speeches?” Mr. Petro added.
Mr. Marcio Astrini, Executive Secretary of the Climate Observatory, noted that “the planet is melting. We are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries are unable to put in large letters that deforestation needs to be zero.”
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